Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
is the spiritual grandchild of von Humboldt, and Jacques Huber, less known, but a preeminent botan-
ist. Here was no frozen-faced savant with depressing wisps of this hair as in those German portraits.
3
Huber is a subtle spirit served by an organism both robust and sleek:
vir quadratus
, as a naturalist
ought to be, because the natural sciences today demand thinking titans whose muscles evolve along
with their minds. The match between his sensitive, powerful intellect and the integrity of a robust
physique is the consequence of his arduous forays into the wilderness. This scholar can complete an
expeditionofsixhundredleagues—fromBelémtotheUcayali—inlesstimethananyoneofuswould
take to travel to Gávea.
4
I spent two unforgettable hours with him, and returned to the ship with a monograph in which he
analyzed the region that had seemed to me so barren and monotonous. I delighted in this volume the
entire night: and at dawn the next day—one of those “glorious days” about which Bates writes—I
went up to the deck and there, with my eyes burning with insomnia, I saw the Amazon for the first
time. At last there rose up in me the commotion of feeling that earlier had eluded me. How singular
seemed that smooth and muddy surface. Now at last I was reminded of the superfluity of sky above
and of water below of the last unfinished page of Genesis, still incomplete and marvelously writing
itself. I then understood the innocent yearning of Cristobal da Cunha for the source of that great river
to be Paradise. . . .
I considered again those undefined shoals, those islands or half-islands diluted by gentle
waves—and I saw the gestation of a world. What I had first seen as a desperate crawl and pathetic
grasping was in fact a leap of triumph. The plants were saving the land in a struggle through
which shone a singular intelligence. Here was the phalanx of
anigas
—those giant aroids
5
with their
stiff leaves, brilliant and sharp as though chiseled, united in palisades against the assault of the
waters. There, set against the slow-swirling drifts of sediment, were the sieves and filters of
ca-
naranas
—aquatic grasses—and
aturizal
thickets. Along the banks extended the twisted roots of the
mangroves, in whose mesh the diluted mud transformed itself into a resistant soil, whence soon
emerged the bush lianas and, draping over everything, tresses of
apuirana
vines and
juquiri
scrub.
Thus in the end terra firma was carved out, forming itself slowly in the
buriti
palm swamps, where
the palms open their enormous, whispering fronds to the blue sky. Foreshadowing the forest to come,
destroying at a stroke all the monotony of that unending flatness, arise majestic
ceibas
—silk cotton
trees—high and round and softly undulating in endless rolling landscapes, hills of green.
I understood then, under the resplendent and limpid sky, that land emerges from the womb of the
waters. Thence from the rising sap springs the forest, conjured upward by the magnet of light. I con-
tinued my journey under the spell of a new enchantment, but with a dispiriting worry.
There was nothing “literary” about my new, truly artistic impression: it had not been inspired by
expert stylists. The “poet”—Huber—who aroused it had neither rhyme nor meter. The eloquence and
brilliance were frankly imparted by the extraordinary display surrounding him. I, son and desperate
lover of the land, could not find in myself the choice words with which to describe it, but he could,
using only language drawn from the austere lexicon of technical diction. I discovered then how diffi-
cult is a trivial thing in these times when the earth is crammed with topics:
to write
.
6
A few days later he was off to Manaus, a place that would become for him a kind of in-
cubatorofbothgreatnessanddespair.AshesteamedupfromBelém(aneasytriptotake
today) he observed this “unfolding world,” a world, as he wrote Veríssimo, “as yet un-
the Bahian outback. There, in the Sertão, the place and people were forgotten by history
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